Christmas At Liberty Farm

For us Christmas begins on December 25th and runs through January 5th so rather than saying we had a good Christmas, I will say that we are having a good Christmas. So far this week has seen more play and less work on my part but that's OK.

We did get the ram removed from the ewe flock and put back into the pen with our other ram. Their heads are a bit sore from reestablishing who's boss but we have them in a small enough pen that they're not able to get enough of a running start to hurt each other much. The ewe lambs are reunited with their mothers. Tomorrow I hope to get hay. My first source didn't pan out so I'm going to call my second source soon.

Yesterday we drove over to Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio. It is a recreation of a canal town from the early 1800s. I picked up a neat little book - A Fine Poor Man's Country by M. Ruth Norton. The title comes from an excerpt from a letter printed in the preface:

...I would say that it is a fine poor man's country and if you ever come [to Ohio] now is the time...money is plenty...I have more boots to make now than I can make for two or three months and could not get any [apprentices] to hire this fall...any industrious man at any employment can make a decent living here if he should begin without one cent in his pocket.
-letter from John Boyd, shoemaker in Roscoe, Ohio to his cousin Hugh in Ireland

Here is a photo of me taken there.
I've always liked this beard style but my wife can't get over the Amish look. So I guess this was me for a day. Here a couple more photos from our daytrip. Have a blessed Christmas season and a happy New Year!

Update

Well. I suppose the lack of posting shows that there's not much going on around here. Today was my last day of work off the farm until January 2nd so I've got some work planned for the coming week - not the least of which is trimming all the sheep hooves, moving the breeding ram back into the bachelor pen and reuniting the ewe lambs with their mothers. We also need to buy another 50-60 bales of hay to get through the remainder of the winter. I hope to put together my seed order and last but not least get in some reading and relaxing time. Sitting on the shelf in front of me are: Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America by Senator-elect James Webb, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War by Thomas DiLorenzo and Fields Without Dreams: Defending The Agrarian Idea by Victor Davis Hanson. Plus my mom always buys me books for Christmass. Oh yeah, I've been spending a lot of my time working on a remodeling project at my church and will probably put in a couple days work there over the next week or so. And I'm working on the first edition of the Liberty Farm newsletter. (I better end this post - my list of work keeps growing).

So, that's what's happening here. I'll try to post some sheep photos next week. Be well and have a blessed Christmass.

What is This?

These photos were taken in the eastern sky between 7:05 and 7:15 this morning. When we first saw it, the sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon. There was a very bright light that appeared to be moving up surrounded by an umbra of light. Just minutes later the ball was gone and only the "tail" remained. As soon as the sun lit up the sky enough, the whole thing was obliterated.

The top photo was taken last. The bottom photo is the same as the middle one but I used the "auto contrast" feature in Picasa2 and then cropped it. This was much more spectacular in person than the camera was able to capture.

So, any ideas on what it is? Our guesses range from atmospheric gases lit up by the sun to an exploding meth lab.

Update: Thank you, Polly. This is apparently what we saw.
Update II: And here's a link from our local newspaper.

Conserving Forest Communities

The third essay in Wendell Berry's Another Turn Of The Crank is titled "Conserving Forest Communities." In it, Berry brings many of the same ideas he has about agriculture to woodlands. Just as agriculture is best when done on a small, local scale with relationships between farmers and eaters, woodland use and management is done best on a community scale with local ownership and use of the products of the forest. These products may include lumber for building and for furniture, firewood, woodland herbs like ginseng, grape vines, etc. Rather than me trying to summarize, I'll let the author speak for himself.

Often the trees have been regarded merely as obstructions to row cropping, which, because of the steepness of the terrain, has necessarily caused severe soil losses from water erosion. If an accounting is ever done, we will be shocked to learn how much ecological capital this kind of farming required for an almost negligible economic return: thousands of years of soil building were squandered on a few crops of corn or tobacco.

There is no local interest connecting the woods workers to the woods. They do not regard the forest as a permanent resource but rather as a purchased "crop" that must be "harvested" as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

The economy of this kind of forestry is apt to be as deplorable as its ecology. More than likely only the prime log of each tree is taken - that is, the felled tree is cut in two below the first sizable branch, leaving behind many board feet in short logs (that would be readily usable, say, if there were small local woodworking shops) as well as many cords of firewood. The trees thus carelessly harvested will most likely leave the local community and the state as sawlogs or, at best, rough lumber. The only local benefit may well be the single check paid by the timber company to the landowner.

But we must be careful. In the past we have too often merely trusted that the corporate economy or the governement would dispose of natural resources in a way that would be best for the land and the people. I hope we will not do that again. That trust has too often been catastrophically misplaced. From now on we should disbelieve that any corporation ever comes to any rural place to do it good, to "create jobs," or to bring to the local people the benefits of the so-called free market. It will be a tragedy if the members of Kentucky's rural communities ever again allow themselves passively to be sold off as providers of cheap goods and cheap labor. To put the bounty and the health of our land, our only commonwealth, into the hands of people who do not live on it and share its fate will always be an error. For whatever determines the fortune of the land determines also the fortune of the people.

We can safely predict that for a long time there are going to be people in places of power who will want to solve our local problems by inviting in some great multinational corporation. They will want to put millions of dollars of public money into an "incentive package" to make it worthwhile for the corporation to pay low wages and for our labor and to pay low prices for, let us say, our timber. It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a governement subsidy. [emphasis mine - J.G.]

That last quote is my favorite. The nearby city that my family's business is in gives away these kinds of tax incentives and abatements all the time. We've never sought anything of the kind and never will. It's disgusting when you think about the working people paying taxes to subsidize these "free-market capitalists."

Once again, Berry nails it. Local ownership, local control, local economy, strong community.

My Amish Experience

Our church is doing some remodeling and we hired an Amish cabinetmaker to build a new altar, pulpit and baptismal font. Since this Amishman lives near me, I've been the liaison in our dealings with him.

Harley is an agreeable man - 26 years old and married with three young children. I've had the pleasure of getting to know him a little and seeing him interact with his daughter, Susannah, who is about 2 years old and his 3 month-old son, Clarence. Susannah sometimes takes her naps in the afternoon on her father's big workbench. Earlier this week, Clarence sat in his carrier on that same bench while his father and I talked and his mother and sisters milked the cow. Another time, Susannah and I watched Harley milk the cow while he and I talked livestock and barn layout.

Last night, I went over and Harley's father, sister, brother-in-law and nieces and nephew were just leaving. They had just completed the construction of a dining room table for the sister and brother-in-law. When all the leaves are in place, the table is 16 feet 9 inches long (over 5m).

When I first met Harley, we spoke of how hidden costs always crop in construction projects. He told me that when he built his house, he thought he had the price figured to the last dollar. "I was sure it was going to cost me $20,000," he said, "and it ended up costing me almost 30."

Harley's off-grid, simple lifestyle appeals to me. Yes, I'll admit to being a romantic but I'm enough of a realist to know that it's not an easy life. Then again, perhaps we need to define "easy."

Is it "easy" to own a $250,000 McMansion compared to a neat, simple $30,000 home?
Is it "easy" to drive 40 miles a day in a gas-guzzling SUV to participate in a rat race in order to maintain a consumerist lifestyle that is a constant cycle of buying and throwing away compared to a home-based life that strengthens families and small communities?

Since our modern society is geared toward the former choices, they do indeed appear easier. But that ease belies the unsustainability of such a society. We simply cannot continue to pile up debt and burn natural resources at the rate we're going. (I'm speaking of myself here as much as anyone).

The thing that I most envy about Harley's lifestyle is the sense of community. I'd guess there are maybe twenty Amish homes in his immediate vicinity and I'm sure he knows them all. Want some furniture made? Go down the road about a mile and see Roman Yoder - if you pass the apple trees, you've gone too far. Need something turned on a wood lathe? Go about another mile or so and turn left on the road that the county abandoned but is still maintained by the Amish families who live there.

Getting to know Harley has solidified in me the desire to simplify my lifestyle and to get to know my neighbors better. I think that combining the appropriate use of technology with the simplicity of the Amish life would be the best of both worlds.

From The One, Two

Today, I completed one of the weekend projects that I eluded to in an earlier post. Our 24-foot long (7.5 m) hoophouse is now two 12-foot long hoophouses. It was a simple matter of cutting the base and each of the the two purlins. There was a hoop on center so I just cut right beside it and added two new 2x6 end boards and one new hoop.

I decided to do this because the structure was just too long and unwieldy. It was necessary to use a tractor to move it and I was afraid that the base wouldn't last another season without coming apart. We now have a lot more flexibility in that we can pasture our hens in one and raise replacement layers and/or broilers in the other.

The other project that I haven't yet completed is taking samples to send away for a soil test. I figure that I need separate samples for the lower pasture and the hilltop pasture and the vegetable garden. I'm planning to use Ohio Earth Food for the tests. If anyone has experience with this company, I would appreciate hearing about it.

Sheep Love and Thanksgiving Reading

I'm not sure that's a good title for this post. It's hard to tell what kind of pervs will find this blog on Google. Oh, well... Joash and Frost spent yesterday afternoon away from the rest of flock. We're pretty sure that Frost is "with child" today but she has been one of our later lambing ewes in the past so maybe she didn't catch. We'll know in the spring.

This morning over breakfast, I read The Man Who Created Paradise: A Fable by Gene Logsdon with fantastic photographs by Gregory Spaid. The front cover photo, along with several others, was shot in Knox County, Ohio which is our neighboring county to the southeast. Knox County is a mid-Ohio hotbed of sustainable agriculture. The pastured pork, grass-fed beef, 100% grass-fed mozzarella, and organic chicken feed that we buy all comes from there. The story is about Wally Spero, a man who reclaims strip-mined land in southeastern Ohio with his old bulldozer, "Alice," and turns it into a small farm paradise. Thirty years pass and a thriving rural community grows up amid the ruin of the raped land of Appalachia. It was a very good read and especially appropriate for Thanksgiving.

I'm also continuing with Wendell Berry's collection of essays, Another Turn of the Crank. The second essay is "Conserving Communities." In it, Berry chronicles the fate of rural communities as America has replaced agri-"culture" with agri-"business."

The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by "creating jobs." They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in "job creation" only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health - economic or natural or human - any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, "the buck never stops."

And:

The governmental and educational institutions from which rural people should by right have received help have not helped. Rather than striving to preserve the rural communities and economies and an adequate rural population, these institutions have consistently aided, abetted and justified the destruction of every part of rural life. They have eagerly served the superstition that all technological innovation is good. They have said repeatedly that the failure of farm families, rural businesses, and rural communities is merely the result of progress and efficiency and is good for everybody.

I could go on and on but for the sake of space (and copyright rules) I'm going to select some individual sentences that give a sense of what the author is communicating:

"...as we now begin to see, you cannot have a postagricultural world that is not also postdemocratic, postreligious, postnatural - in other words, it will be posthuman, contrary to the best that we have meant by humanity."

"[Promotors of the so-called global economy] believe that a farm or a forest is or ought to be the same as a factory; that care is only minimally necessary in the use of the land; that affection is not necessary at all; that for all practical purposes a machine is as good as a human; that the industrial standards of production, efficiency, and profitability are the only standards that are necessary; that the topsoil is lifeless and inert; that soil biology is safely replaceable by soil chemistry, that the nature or ecology of any given place is irrelevant to the use of it; that there is no value in human community or neighborhood; and that technological innovation will produce only benign results."

"American agriculture has demonstrated by its own ruination that you cannot solve economic problems just by increasing scale and, moreover, that increasing scale is almost certain to cause other problems - ecological, social, and cultural."

"Long experience has made it clear - as we might say to the liberals - that to be free we must limit the size of the government and we must have some sort of home rule. But it is just as clear - as we might say to the conservatives - that it is foolish to complain about big government if we do not do everything we can to support strong local communities and strong community economies."

Get the book. Read it.